Carene Waterman

Saves this one for last.

Tabula Rasa is the only layout I'd ever theme. And yet no one does it, and the few that are there are just colour themes.

On the other hand, TR is the base of most of the other layouts, so it gets used. I've come to understand how this happened.

From my perspective a style has three parts:

1. The layout, which is where things are positioned and the core typography.

2. The skin, or the design or whatever you want to call the borders and backgrounds, the box-shadows and font effects, the position refinements--like the icon biting into the corner of an entry, etc.

3. The colour scheme and the background images.

Now, there's overlap between those--what's padding is it layout or skin? And what's skin, does it include the number of different colours and where they're used, or is that colour scheme?

But for me, 2 and 3 are what a theme is and 1 is the layout. But, what's happened as styles got developed is that 1 and 2 are the layout and usually the theme is only 3.

And there's technical reasons for this--if you want to have a border, you have to have the property set in the layout layer, and so on. But, Tabula Rasa has all that flexibility, and it's a natural for CSS only designers to go to town on, and they haven't done that. The CSS only people don't seem to ever want to step out of private styles.

Maybe DW should just accept that and set up a different way for CSS only styles to get made public. Set up a static site with live previews. Something. Paging through a couple of comms of code that's never been vetted seems like a lot of work.

Theme is Grey Days by asenathwaite.

This has the look of a couple of other styles, it's got the modules coloured individually which always makes me think of old LJ styles.

It's easy to read, easy to colour theme, has no big missteps and the same issues/features of all the other similar layouts.

Icon's up in the header, which makes it flow nicely, and there's some clunky spacing with topnav.

Content pretty evenly balanced with theme here.

Theme is Red Squiggle by Regna

I like this use of background images a lot because it's not pushing the content down just for decoration.

It's very nicely designed with a cohesive look across pages.

I notice here that there's no current style on the navigation menu. This is something only a few styles use, but I think it's a key piece of communication to the user and shouldn't be overlooked.

This layout lends itself to all sorts of themes in a lot of colours.

Theme is by sarken

My username overflows the sidebar at my 16px default font with a 14px minimum. If I were choosing styles, I wouldn't look any farther.

I like the very modern look and the clever use of shadows and geometric shapes.

And hallelujah! Finally a style that just prevents you from putting anything in tertiary in two column set up. That beats letting you do it, but styling it so it won't work.

Distinctive and striking layout that needs a little attention to scalability.

This is an excellent layout for style makers to look at for tips on how to use s2 to customize your layout and extend the layout beyond the reading page.

I got some fabulous ideas from it that helped me refine mine.

Theme is Citrusy by rising.

I like this layout a great deal. Even with a vibrant colour scheme like the theme I chose, the content still take centre stage.

The very simple design of horizontal lines and borders aids in presenting the content, not detracts from it.

There's some good spacing on the modules and everything is well spaced.

I don't like the blobbed together Tertiary modules.

The calendar--another wide one, looks not bad.

Excellent design that could take a host of colour schemes.

Theme is memory I by dancing_serpent.

Possibly my favourite header in terms of use of space and images.

The sidebar header bars seem like they're from the wrong style. Something to blend more with the images used on entries would be nicer--or skip the colour blocking altogether.

Oh! I wasn't expecting the image and colour block used on my internal headings in entries. I hates that. The only thing worse is complex blockquote styles--something I don't like in Abstractia, or that LJ style everyone and their brother uses with the coloured italics. Ick.

Also the headers bork the layout if they're close to the icon because background images and floats don't mix. Those icons should be positioned some other way if the heading images are meant to be in entries.

Theme is calculated risks by timeasmymeasure.

Another nice use of border radius, but boy does this one show the Firefox display bug. Bleed through everywhere. And it looks worse in Chrome. Webkit simply can't handle borders and border radius, particularly such thin ones.

Without the browser bugs, this would be awesome. Hey, maybe it looks fantastic in IE9?

This one styles the current navigation link, which is nice to see.

The curved corners demand padding, so the spacing is nice.

Lovely colours in this theme too.

I like it, and I'd use it if it displayed properly. I'll try Opera...

There's some bleed through, like the Webkit kind--element background, not parent element, but less noticable. It gets really, really bad a some zooms. Opera zoom and border radius, not chocolate and peanut butter.

Border radius, use it with low contrast colours, or skip the border part. Don't put anything more than tiny round corners on buttons, or they look tragically bad in Chrome.

Name gives me pause. I like comfortable spacing. We'll see which margins it has less of.

Theme and layout by momijizukamori.

Oh, that's clever--with the border that doesn't quite extend to the edge of the entries. Interesting.

Colour blocks like this are not really my thing, but this looks good.

Topnav buggers up the flow by making the top entry look like it has a big margin. It would look better with a sidebar coloured border below it or as part of the header area.

Icons with really large borders are also not my thing, but if the icon was in the header, it would look not bad. The content is so clean with the style being focused elsewhere, the icon is a sore thumb.

Puts the focus on the content, has lovely calendars and easy comfortable spacing.

It actually looks really good with margins set--the slightly tight looking sidebar seems more open.

Loading up Tertiary in two column works okay--the spacing on the modules is not great, but usable.

Theme is Prophecy by dancing_serpent

Not my sort of colour scheme, but it is a good lesson in how to use multiple colours without it all getting to be out of control.

This layout is also my inspiration. See, I hate the current obsession with border radius. I hate the blurry little pixelated "rounded" corners on every input box ever. I hate the effort put into making rounded corner tabs and buttons.

And I like this layout.

This is how you can take a feature that isn't implemented all that well--the poor anti-aliasing and the various browser display bugs make border radius one CSS3 feature that needs work--and still use it to great effect.

I fired this up in Chrome and it looks good there, so obviously this isn't suffering from any webkit display issues, which if I recall, are mostly element background bleed through on the outer corner when a border is used.

It also misses the Firefox display bug--the parent background can bleed through between the border and the element background, which makes me think Firefox doesn't actually deploy clip correctly. You can see this if an element has a background with a high contrast to the background set on the parent element and also a high contrast to the border.

I like the way that tertiary can take more modules, the archive and tags pages look good, and for all it's a busy layout, it puts the content first through simple clean entries.

Nice comfortable spacing--one good thing about border radius is it forces people to put padding on containers.

Oh, I don't understand this layout! (Theme is desert by Rising, but I checked others.) Is this a holdover from it pre-dating one column layouts?

Why is the navigation horizontal but not in the header? My guess--the design assumes you want this in Tertiary, and if that's all you have there it looks fab.

Why are the lower modules so clumped up with no line-height, margin, padding, anything? See above guess, this is not optimized for custimization.

The entry text is gorgeously spaced for easy reading, but those modules really, really are not done well--there is not a lick of space between them.

Why doesn't this default to links not icons for entry management etc.? No answer on this one.

The page summary really makes me want to cry, it could be awesome and it's just a wall of underlined text. I assume one is not meant to want a page summary.

Clearly this layout is for a particular use case. It is not adaptable to variations on the theme of large font needs without actually making a theme that adds CSS.